


A Hazy Shade of Winter

by homesickblues



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Canon, Flangst?, Fluff, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Slow Burn, stubborn buttheads being stubborn buttheads
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-05-04 13:02:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5335112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/pseuds/homesickblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Hiraeth: [Noun, Welsh.] A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was.</i>
</p><p>This is the first time Eames brazenly stumbles straight into his life. Unwelcome, infuriating and <i>blinding</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

February 2014: Tallinn, Estonia

*

When things go sour, Arthur is always the first to know and the last to leave.

This is how it always has been; he alerts the team and they vanish, each in their own way, and he stays behind to tie together any loose strings and run diversions. It’s the most unfortunate part of the Point Man’s job, but he’s used to it. He’s trained for it. Besides, he’s best at working quickly when he has nothing— or no one—there to distract him. 

Here’s the thing: Arthur is used to being alone. The whole ‘work in close proximity to a group of people for extended periods of time, and then also share _dreams_ with those people’ thing is still something he’s trying his best to overcome his discomfort with, and it’s by no means an easy task. His whole life, he’s been used to being alone. He worked alone for years, a faceless, nameless teenage hacker taking down Wall Street and Big Business from either his mother’s warm, cozy apartment or his father’s cold, bitter mansion; a typical broken home sap-story past he tells virtually no one in his professional life about. Before he had been tempted into the dreamshare business with fancy wristwatches, suits, and expensive artwork, he had found vast amounts of comfort in his solitude. 

So, really, it’s not that bad when things don’t go as planned. In this instance, things went downhill quickly and the team had scattered to the wind mere moments after they’d received his one-word text message on the matter. Once he’s sure they’re all gone (and in all but entirely random directions), he meticulously packs the equipment away in its proper cases, stores the small vials of precariously labeled chemicals and sedatives (Yusuf’s scrawl has become less and less legible since their first Inception job, probably due to his increased anxiety and rapidly growing apathy) and burns each and every printed document, letter, or receipt in a small fire he starts out back of the warehouse in a barrel. Their Architect’s models and lay-outs are amateur at best and only in the early stages of development, so those are easy to dispose of as well. When he’s finally finished and about to leave the warehouse to be found and scoured by a team of burly dark suits, he pauses, seeing something small and dark laying discarded by one of the long, tall windows facing the street. The blinds are drawn tightly, but some slivers of golden light leak through, silhouetting the round object as it lays flat on the ground. He approaches and bends down, taking the small poker chip into his fingers and running his thumb over the smooth surface. He isn’t supposed to be touching this. This isn’t supposed to _be here_. Eames dropped by for _one day_ at the very beginning of the job. Their paths had just crossed and he left in a hurry, as he often does; Fingers grazing, eyes meeting, words unsaid.

This is how he knows something’s actually quite wrong. 

For all of Eames’s mysteries, all of his inconsistencies and contradictions, Arthur knows one thing for certain: he isn’t sloppy. Putting on the front that he’s sloppy and loose is one of his favorite games, but in many ways he’s even more clean-cut than Arthur when it comes to a job. 

And that is no easy feat.

And he’s certainly never let his totem stray far from its normal home between his thumb and middle finger, let alone on the dirty floor of an abandoned, asbestos and termite-infested car repair warehouse in Estonia. 

Arthur feels wrong with the chip in his hands, like an intruder to something he has no idea how to understand, so he quickly slides it into the pocket of his slacks (opposite from the pocket where his own loaded die is tucked safe and soundly away). Putting on his overcoat and sunglasses, he quickly lifts the metal case of the PASIV and the messenger bag full of vials and exits, locking the door. He walks several blocks toward the beach and stops against the railing on a walkway, tossing the key straight into the Baltic. 

When he returns to the hotel, it feels like the chip is burning a hole in the leg of his pants.

This is much too messy for his liking. Eames will have to get a new token, and until then, he’ll have to worry that he’s going to start to edge toward that steep precipice they’ve both gone too close to many times before in their past. Arthur’s always been there to yank him back, or at least toe him away from the edge, but this time Eames could be anywhere and Arthur still has to stay back and make sure all their business has been terminated. 

Messy. Careless. _Sloppy_. 

He doesn’t, however, fully grasp just how sour the situation truly is until later that evening. He’s packing, getting ready to make a quick exit early the next morning. He sits down to open his laptop and run a quick search for Eames, try and see where his last movements were so he can land at his door, as he so often does, when the fire alarm goes off. The gnawing noise kicks his senses into gear and he moves quickly. He can’t just flee like any normal patron, not with his _responsibilities_ sitting neatly on the sofa near the window, so he quickly snatches up them up – the luggage, the satchel with the chemicals and the PASIV – and makes his way not toward the staircase, but out onto the wire balcony and down the fire escape ladder outside. This move is so purely him, so very _Arthur_ in its timing and process that he almost feels he shouldn’t be surprised when a bullet comes out of seemingly nowhere and lodges itself just above his clavicle, causing his arm to automatically go slack with pain so he lets go of the ladder, dropping about two stories to the ground below. He lands awkwardly on one leg that snaps like it’s made of paper mache, causing him to let out a mangled scream, which is instantly drowned out by the blaring fire alarm still bellowing from all of the opened windows. 

For a moment there’s nothing but cobblestone under his back, the cloudy sky above his head, and the warm, sticky feeling of blood soaking through his shirt and trickling down his chest. Then, in an instant, he sees stony grey-blue eyes over him like a mossy stone or an angry sea. Emotionless. _Hateful_. 

There is, coincidentally, only one person on planet earth knows him well enough to calculate his movements well enough to find him in a moment of vulnerability.

In his pocket, his die feels heavier than ever. The chip feels light as air.


	2. The Shape I'm In

April, 2007

*

“Are we opening the team up to kindergarteners?” A tall, slender, _stringy_ man named Nash sneered as he entered the room, eying Arthur with disdain. Arthur has read his file and can’t help but perk the corner of his lips up into a smirk at the comment, given Nash is only two years older than himself, and has actually had quite a bit _less_ time working in dreams.

He’s some boring recruit Dom Cobb, the extractor he generally allows to boss him around, decided would be an asset when he scanned over some university-level architecture theses. Arthur didn’t find them too impressive, but he’s also simply much squarer when it comes to Architects, and he’s aware of it. 

“I forgot you haven’t met Arthur yet,” Cobb waves his hand dismissively, barely looking up, “He’s been doing some independent work for a few months now, but I lured him back.”

By “independent work” Cobb means losing his tail; building himself a stronghold fortified with aliases and false leads. It’s what he’s best at. It’s what he does. 

By “lured him back” he means painstakingly reminding him of how he owes him for covering Arthur’s tracks after he got into a bit of a sticky situation in Budapest last summer. Arthur normally lives by a “owe nobody anything” life policy, but Cobb and his wife Mal are blaring exceptions, and taking a job in London seemed like a nice chance to rest and fine-tune his skills. 

Nash flashes Arthur another uneasy stare, and his lip curls into a bit of a snarl when he sees Arthur still smirking at him.

Arthur pushes himself from the desk he’s leaning on and strides over to the PASIV, sitting delicately on a small table off to the side. He doesn’t figure he needs to acknowledge Nash with any sort of greeting. As far as Arthur’s concerned, he’s beneath him. 

His ego’s always been quite large ever since the government showed up at his door, begging him to come and join a military spec-ops team because his underground hacking work was so impressive. Being solely responsible for the undoing of several corporate tycoon embezzlers, Wall Street crooks and white-supremacist groups didn’t hurt it either.

And now he’s a damn good Point Man. Good enough that he knows he’s both coveted and feared, and that’s exactly where he wants to be. He considers himself the most dangerous and efficient twenty-five year old kindergartener in the sandbox. 

He runs his fingers over the cool, familiar tin surface of the PASIV before carefully opening it, cleaning it and prepping it. He hasn’t done this and months and yet it comes to him as naturally as caressing a lover. The rigorous training he went through back in the military has made him dangerously tactile with this expensive piece of equipment, certainly one of the best-trained experts to defect from legitimacy. He was building computers from scrap metal when he was thirteen years old. Real, working computers: slick and tidy and _fast_. The PASIV is child’s play to him. His fingers are built for fiddling and wiring – long, slender, callused – and the mechanism of it all sooths him. 

He can feel Nash watching him with a succinct contempt and does his best to channel it into doing a clean and efficient job. 

It’s just the three of them this time around. Mal, Dom’s razor sharp and brilliant French wife, is off answering to her father’s beck and call elsewhere in the world. He misses her quips, but she simply isn’t needed. It’s supposed to be a short job, just snagging some information about some corporate embezzlement from the minds of one of the top employees. Nothing too strenuous by any stretch of the imagination. 

Or so he thinks. 

Three weeks of preparation and they have the man, Hyun-Soo Park, dreaming of a straight-laced office building with square cubicles and white walls. Arthur isn’t the best architect; his lines are much too straight, making the dream seem pretty blatantly _unreal_. Simply too clean and perfect. But when they’re in a pinch for just such a short extraction, it does the job fine. As long as the Mark doesn’t look too closely at the layout. 

In the beginning, everything goes well. Park takes all the bait, getting nearer and nearer to giving Cobb the passcode to a safe sitting in the other room just off of the long meeting room they’re camped out in; one that’ll give them what they need. Park’s projections meander past suspiciously, but still calm, occasionally glancing at Cobb with weary eyes. They move like white blood cells that haven’t quite figured out there’s a virus yet, but with every dream-minute, they draw closer to realizing something is not quite right.

It’s precisely the moment Cobb has the man pinned to the point where he’s writing down the “first numbers that come to mind” on a napkin when the gunfire begins, and his projections lose all sense of complacency and go straight for Cobb and Park. Cobb has just enough time to shoot Arthur a confused and angry look before shoving Park back against the wall, confused and screaming at Cobb in panicked Korean, and deflecting the vicious attacks of the projections. Arthur doesn’t have time to worry about them anymore, or even the projections that have noticed his own presence. His only job now is to take the numbers Park so easily relinquished and get the safe open. He knows he only has mere seconds before the dream begins to collapse. He rushes into the room with the safe, only to find the safe open and the room empty. 

_But how…?_

He rushes out into the hallway in a blind, flailing panic, much less in the smooth, agile manner he usually maintains. A sleek black glock with a long silencer attached manifests itself into his right hand. He gets a glimpse of a man barreling down the hallway, narrowly dodging violent attacks from the projections. The man is all broad shoulders and lean but bulky muscles, rippling as he barrels down the unfinished hallway. When the man reaches the end, he turns around. Arthur can see his bright grey eyes, the smooth curve of his plump lips as he looks back at him, a coy smile playing around his mischievous eyes, before bringing his own gun to his head.

It’s then the dream finally gives way as if the last support-beam in the middle has simply collapsed. The projections and the debris reach him at the same time and for one, brief, _weightless_ second, he’s falling.

And then he’s awake.

The kick is enough of a jolt for him to leap out of his chair immediately. He wakes only to find Nash unconscious on the floor and the door to their hotel room ajar.

This is the first time Eames brazenly stumbles straight into his life. Unwelcome, infuriating and _blinding_.

For a few days of damage control, the man is nothing but a blur in his mind. A shit-eating grin with crooked teeth and big lips, tattoos peeking out from under his sleeves… Arthur replays the image in his mind like a broken record, over and over again. When things fall completely to shit and the information he had stolen from their failed extraction get into the wrong hands, Arthur even puts himself under and tries to conjure up a projection of him, attempting to wrangle his memory into finding a better _whole_ image of the thief, because at the moment his brain can only think of him in _parts_. 

Arthur’s good at what he does. The best. And yet, it takes him almost a full week to get ahold of even a vague whispering of this man. 

“No use in trying to find him,” A twitchy ex-extractor tells him in a shaking and wrecked voice as Arthur holds a gun to his head, “I-I-I mean it. He’s like some kind of fucking pariah. Never leaves the same tail twice. Always leaves about a million false leads behind him. Impossible to contact unless you’re dealing with some seriously fucked-up third parties—I only made that mistake once. If you’re smart… of course you are, you’ll do the same.” 

Arthur leaves Prague feeling like he has less knowledge than he had when he flew in. But when things went belly-up, Cobb had vanished with Nash somewhere east to work on chasing new leads, and he’d left Arthur to try and track down the man who fucked everything up. Or at least the people he’s working for. Neither seem to exist. 

Everything is disgustingly bad timing. It’s nearly Christmas, a holiday which Arthur will most definitely spend alone in a hotel room drinking whatever expensive champagne the mini-bar has to offer, but it’s also the time of year when travel is the hardest and airports are congested. On one hand, this makes flying much more inconspicuous when he can simply get lost in a large crowd. On the other, things take twice as long to move, which means they take four times as long as Arthur can stand it. 

As a military man he’s supposed to know how to be patient, but the teenage hack behind all that dictates otherwise. 

So, he holes himself up in Rome and decides to do what he does best: solve the puzzle. He scrapes through endless loopholes and rabbit trails until there’s a headache starting to creep around his hairline and his eyes are sore and droopy. He speaks briefly on the phone with his mother. He hasn’t been to see her since he defected over a year ago, and he can sense the tension and worry behind her warm-as-honey voice. When she asks him if he’ll be home for Christmas, he makes up an excuse that he has to attend something for his made-up legitimate job and hangs up, finding a bottle of wine to try and forcibly drown his guilt. He rubs his eyes exhaustedly, allowing himself to let his shoulders drop only to realize that they’re strung so tightly they may as well be to his ears by now. Groaning, he slides down onto the silk sheets of his hotel bed, opening his laptop beside where he’s sprawled. More false-leads and dead-ends flood his email. 

_Maybe this guy really doesn’t exist. Maybe I made him up. Maybe he was one of my projections and I’m at fault for the dream crashing. Maybe…_

His doubt comes to an abrupt halt when a small message pops up on his laptop. It’s from some asinine messaging application and it appears in the lower right corner of the screen from an unknown user. 

_“It appears you’ve been trying to find me. It wounds me to see someone as brilliant as you chasing their own tail for so long, so I’ve decided to introduce myself properly.”_

Arthur freezes at this intrusion. He probably has one of the most insane firewalls known to man, thanks to his own efficiency at forcing computers to bend to his will. No one knows how to contact him, let alone know his IP address even exists. 

And yet, there’s the message. Short, contrite, and sweet, sitting in a small chat box in the corner of his screen. 

_I definitely don’t have enough wine in my system to even vaguely begin to deal with this bullshit._

After two more glasses and a long glaring match with the wall above the mini bar, he clicks his laptop awake from sleep and lets his fingers hoover over the keys. 

He could simply delete the message and give his firewall the refit of its _life_ , but that would defeat the purpose of all the looking he’s been doing. If anything, his pride is what’s hurt, because the elusive figure he’s been trying to pin down for so long has the audacity to pop into his personal computer like some kind of Trojan. 

Instead of acting rashly, like he wants to, he types carefully with fast, efficient fingers: 

_“How did you hack my system?”_

He sits back with his glass of merlot, ready for a wait, but instead the reply pops up almost instantly. 

_“I know a guy who knows a guy. But alas, it’s all just cats and dogs now, isn’t it? Here I am, on your computer! And I’m willing to chat. Isn’t this what you wanted….? ;) Heard you flew to Prague to interrogate that poor bastard Nemec. Hope you didn’t rough him up too much, he’s fragile.”_

The smiley face almost, almost causes Arthur to slam his laptop closed and drain the rest of the bottle of wine, but instead he stretches his neck slowly, releasing as much tension as he can allow. He ignores the voices screaming somewhere behind his temples, _HOW DOES HE KNOW?_

_“How did you learn our location for the Park job?”_

The next reply takes a bit longer to return to him, so he’s expecting a lengthy explanation, but instead gets:

_“My sources are for me to know and for you to continue to scratch your pretty head over.”_

This should make him mad. It should send him off into one of his cool rages. He should set up some bugs while he’s got him on the chat and track him and nail him to the wall with lead. It wouldn’t be the first time a retaliation like that has happened in the business, regardless of how much of an infantile business it really is. Criminals always crave blood on their hands. Arthur would simply blend into the rest of them, and this mystery thief would be forgotten about almost instantly. 

Oddly, though, he isn’t mad. No, he’s intrigued. How can someone exist, actually _exist_ , and make it impossible for Arthur to learn a single thing about him? It shouldn’t be possible. Arthur outed six congressmen with Klu Klux Klan associations and another four who were accepting donations under the table from the mob. Arthur uncovered the most seemingly chaste billionaire oil tycoon’s underground sex slave scandal. He’s more than able to find the dirtiest secrets out about anyone and _everyone_ , even people with millions and millions of dollars dedicated to keeping that information buried forever. And yet here this stranger is, a complete enigma to him and, apparently, to everyone else as well. 

_“Who are you?”_ Arthur hesitates in sending this, because he knows he probably won’t get an answer, but he can’t help himself. Hacking him now would be a forfeit to his integrity. It would be too _easy_ , and this man knows it. He’s out of options. He’s been beat. 

When he finally does send it, he gets up and paces; an old habit he inherited straight from his asshole, cheating, wife-beater of an old man. 

He isn’t sure if he truly wants to know who he is. The full lips, the grey eyes, the hints of tattoos on his biceps, his devilish grin… 

Arthur doesn’t have time for that kind of hindrance to his professional life. 

The chat flashes with a new response and Arthur opens it with a pavlovian response, sinking back down onto the bed too quickly. 

_“When you need to know, you’ll know. But first, I should make it clear what my intentions are, seeing as I never wine and dine without my date understanding the implications of dessert. My higher-ups are interested in you, and as am I, and I would like to meet with you to scout you as a possible partner.”_

Arthur types so fast his fingers ache.

_“And what makes you think I want to fall into bed with a bunch of thieves?”_

_There are rules_ , Arthur thinks, _even in this fucked-up business full of crooks, there are_ rules. 

The stranger, apparently, can type just as fast as Arthur.

_“Because you don’t know that we’re thieves. You don’t know what we are. But you’re curious. So let’s tango, Mr. Cohen. I’ll be in Venice for the next 24 hours. If you aren’t at the piazza by high noon tomorrow, I’ll assume you’ve let that stick wedge itself even further up your arse, and have decided that my offer is beneath you. But I’ll be there, and I hope you’ll join me so we can discuss next steps. Promise not to steal anything from you if you behave.”_

Arthur stands and sticks his head out of the small, rusty window on the other side of the room, taking deep breaths and letting the warm, humid air engulf him. He can feel his hair start the curl at the end from all the moisture, but he doesn’t give himself time to care. His brain is aflame with calculations.

The train ride to Venice is roughly four hours. He could leave in half an hour. There’s bound to be a train before midnight. Then he could hole up in some cheap hotel (which will hopefully be unpredictable enough so that this man who should know _nothing_ about him doesn’t guess his location) and scout the area, scout an escape route, scout out…

The messenger beeps from across the room and Arthur finds himself practically sprinting to read it. 

_“Anyway, I do hope you take up my offer. Your man Cobb doesn’t need to know right now, but we have interest in him too, which means he’ll know when and if the time is right. But for now, just bring yourself…. And for the record, Mr. Cohen, this isn’t a normal occurrence. The people I work for don’t just skip merrily around and hold hands with every Point Man they come across. You’re wasted on these low-risk extraction jobs. Your history definitely indicates that you should be spending your precious time doing some crazier shit, perhaps getting off on adrenaline. I’m sure you’ll consider. xx”_

He books his ticket.


	3. Blame It on a Simple Twist of Fate

It isn’t until Arthur’s already half way between Bologna and Ferrara, the Italian countryside whipping past him in a lush green blur, that he realizes Venice is _definitely_ a bad idea. Before it was a _maybe,_ but now it’s a _definitely,_ and yet here he is, surrounded by screaming kids and snoring old men; _stuck._ He’s never one to do things off-the-cuff based on purely instinct. He tries very hard to repress any and all impulsive urges because they generally lead to a messy clean-up, at least in his experience. All things in Arthur’s life turn out for the best if they are compartmentalized and calculated.  But here he is, running off of absolutely no sleep and at least four cups of coffee, wearing jeans and a ratty old hoodie. His hair’s dirty and crusty from the dried gel but down from its normal slicked-back style, curling slightly from under the beanie hat he shoved onto his head when his ears started to get cold at the train station. He looks like an utter mess, completely out of his element, and yet _here he is_.

It dawns on him that he has no idea if this guy’s completely playing him, maybe even _kidnapping_ him, for fuck’s sake. It’s _Venice_. There’s no fast escape. No get-away car within city limits, unless he wants to hijack a gondola and paddle his ass out of there. The streets will be flooded with tourists, hordes of gawking men in flip-flops ready to take his picture to send to the police at even the slightest disturbance… And these meetings rarely end in shaking hands and cheerful goodbyes when they go awry.

The woman next to him coughs into her sleeve and brings him back to the present. He’s been glaring out the window for a good couple hours now and there’s a creeping pressure beginning to build behind his eyes. He looks down at his phone in his lap, the private one he keeps just for family emergencies, and sees a text from his mother.

_“Hi sweetheart, I hope all is well with you. Have you thought about my invitation to come stay with me for Xmas? I’d love to have you. There’s a stack of Hitchcock films and a bottle of red wine with your name on it! I know it’s such short notice but I figured it’s worth a shot! Love and miss you so, so much. XOXO Mom”_

He deletes the text immediately and quickly uses his phone to erase the fact that it ever existed. He types her number into one of his disposable phones to call her, but hesitates, a pang of something building behind his ribs. Somewhere in the back of his mind, or maybe even his heart, an inviting couch next to a fireplace in Vermont is calling to him.

He chooses instead to put the headphones of his ipod in and close his eyes for the remaining part of the trip. The backs of his eyelids are painted with the image of him laying spread-eagle amongst the pigeons in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, the blood pooling around his body diluted by slowly rising flood waters. 

**

Venice is bizarrely chilly. He’s only been here once before, briefly, in July. It was all strictly business – some opportunity for a job Cobb sent him to sniff out that fell through almost immediately – but he did take some time to wander around the narrow, twisting streets and try and make his way to the Rialto, which he never quite could due to misleading signs and just a general lack of time. This time, as he approaches the city on the ferry he caught, it’s covered in a cool blanket of haze. The humidity is very much still present, causing his cheeks and nose to go red and prickly, but he almost likes it better this way than battling with the scotching sun.

It’s 10am, which means he has a couple of hours before he has to be at the Piazza for his “meeting”. He checks into a hotel a few blocks off the piazza. It’s large, and the lobby is a swam of American tourists with loudly colored sweaters and a variety of fanny packs and camera bags, so it isn’t too difficult for him to discretely get his keys and make his way upstairs without anyone so much as giving him a curious glance. Once he’s in the room, he sets down his duffle bag on the bed and takes some time to shower and dress himself in something nicer than his travel clothes. He wants every moment of this exchange to be professional. He wants to wrestle every moment of the conversation so it’s known that he’s in control, not the other way around.

He has to be in control _no matter what_.

After all, it’s _him_ they supposedly want. He decides to approach this like any other job interview. He’d had plenty of training in such during his time at the Point, and at least in this case, the interviewer isn’t a sergeant. He’s more than prepared to handle anything after years spent in _those_ kinds of interviews, so he tries not to think about this like he’s a salmon swimming up river into a sea of piranhas.

He holsters up not only his favorite glock, but also a small handgun around his ankle and a switchblade in his pocket. Under his immaculately tailored suit, they’re invisible.

 _Fuck it_ , he thinks _, now or never_.

He leaves the hotel and wriggles his way through the seas of people, vehemently ignoring the street artists that jeer at him and the small kids who reach for his pockets as he passes. The street finally spits him out into the openness of the piazza and the crowd he was wedged in disperses. He hears bells chiming to signify the clock striking noon as if they were a movie cue. The fog’s moved a bit higher in the sky, and the sun peaks through the clouds.

He takes one step forward, toward the Basilica, when he spots him. For one fleeting moment, he wanders if he’s dreaming again; if he somehow put himself under and found this projection, like he had so many times before. But no, he’s not dreaming, because the man ten feet in front of him, lounging obscenely in a café chair and looking like any number of the carved statues peppering the architecture, is far too _real_ to be a projection. He’s too perfect, too _detailed_ for Arthur’s mind to conjure up.

He’s wearing some ridiculously horrendous taupe shirt under a blue blazer, and khakis which fit a bit too snugly for Arthur’s attention not to be drawn to the details immediately. The way he’s sitting in the chair is almost comedic; long legs spread out in front of him, his head tilted back and up at the sky. He sports a laughable pair of James Bond-esque sunglasses. And then there’s the things he remembers: the lips, the five o’clock shadow, and the— _oh_. He can’t see the tattoos through his blazer. _Shame_.

He doesn’t have to so much as flinch for the man to turn his attention on him like a hawk. As someone in this line of work, he expects a quick instinctive hand to go to his waist for a gun, but instead the man just gives him a massive, crooked grin; the very same he’d given him before waking himself up for the Park dreamscape.

Arthur clenches his fist.

“Ah, so you didn’t get cold feet after all. Brilliant!” The man pulls his legs in and brushes his knees before standing, pushing his sunglasses up onto his head, “Dreadful weather, isn’t it? Venice is so lovely in the summertime.”

_Really? Your leading line’s the weather?_

“It is,” Arthur agrees curtly.

The man stares straight into his eyes for a quick second, condescendingly observant and flippant all at once, before taking a step forward and squeezing Arthur’s shoulder.

“So glad you could make it. Please, sit."

Arthur doesn’t move.

“I need to know exactly who you are, first, I’m afraid.” He deadpans with coldest eyes he can muster.

The man, infuriatingly, laughs.

“There’s plenty of time for introductions later. Now please, let’s grab a coffee and I’ll explain to you exactly who I _work_ with and why they _want_ you.”

This is an evasive tactic and Arthur knows it, but he figures that identities are sort of deep, dark secrets within their line of work, so he nods once and sits opposite the man, who takes his seat and falls back into an overtly relaxed position.

“What do you take? Black and bitter, I assume?” The man waves over a short and friendly-looking female waitress.

Arthur ignores him and gives the waitress a pleasant smile, ordering a double espresso latte in perfect Italian. The man quirks an eyebrow before ordering a refill on his tea, Yorkshire, cream and extra sugar _per favore_. His Italian is disgustingly bad and it’s all Arthur can do not to roll his eyes.

“Lovely. Right, so…” The man leans forward in his chair then, resting his chin on his hands and offering Arthur a light smile, “We’ve been watching your work for quite a while. And by we… well, I mainly mean me and my partner. But I’ll get to that later. We actually first got a glimpse of you when you were still wrapped up with all those special ops spooks. You tested off the charts and were awarded _several_ high-level clearances and accommodations for your work… what made you come to the dark side, then, Anakin?”

Arthur does roll his eyes at that mediocre attempt at a Star Wars reference before clearing his throat.

_He’s going to have to do better than that._

“I got bored.”

Surprising to even himself, this is the truth. He had missed the days of undermining every level of authority and taking down bad guys like some kind of nerd-vigilante. Even if he technically maybe _was_ a bad guy now, it was still more fun than training jarheads and assisting in indulging various generals’ war-themed wet dreams.

The man perks an eyebrow and holds his curious gaze for a long moment before his face dissolves into another mischievous grin. Arthur watches him like he’s staring down a Da Vinci, trying to take in every minute detail; every possible hint at the truth behind his cloudy eyes. He notices that as the gears turn in his mind, his lips part slightly and there’s a tick in his left hand. He fixates on his teeth and notices they’re crooked but not in an offensive way.

“Good answer, I s’pose. I imagine working for the Man is quite boring, though I’ve never had a taste of it myself,” He pauses to wink, “So, continuing on, we learned you jumped ship ,and before we could get our grubby paws on you, you’d already been hoovered up by Cobb and his mates.”

“Did you try and contact me?” Arthur asks, genuinely curious now after learning how closely he’d actually followed him throughout his career.

“Once. But the security you’ve got on all your private information is like some kind of supped-up stronghold, so it was a failure.”

“You said you aren’t thieves,” Arthur blurts out a little too quickly, getting annoyed at the pace of the conversation, “Or… you implied it. Yet you stole the information we needed to complete the Park job. The price on my head is _still_ floating around the Korean deep web for that, so thanks by the way…” He means to sound way bitterer than he actually does. The man struggles to hold back an exaggerated snort.

“Oh love, have you not figured it out yet? I did it to get _your attention_.”

Arthur stares dumbly at him with his mouth hanging open like he’d just sprouted a second head and it started speaking in tongues.

“You… excuse you?” Is all Arthur can sputter.

The man shakes his head in mock disappointment and laughs, “I like to play games. It’s one of my favorite things to do. My partner chides me for it and thinks it’s childish sometimes, but well… Hear me out. We couldn’t break into your firewall to contact you. Not initially, anyway. You keep things so tight and orderly and cover your footprints so well that it’s almost impossible to find you. So we tracked your man Cobb instead. No offense meant but he isn’t quite as _tidy_ as you are. He leaves quite a trail of breadcrumbs wherever he winds up. You don’t work with him always, though, so when I heard he was working a job in London… well, I had to pop by, didn’t I? Just to see? And there you were. I couldn’t just walk up to you and shake your hand and offer you a job, now could I? You don’t function that way. You and I both know that much, at least. So… I broke in and I fucked your job. Sorry ‘bout that. But it worked, didn’t it? And then the rest is history.”

Arthur worked hard to keep himself calm and collected though his heart was thrashing an unsteady rhythm against his ribcage; despite how much he wanted to lunge across the table and rake his fingernails down the man’s stupid fucking _pretty_ face.

_This piece of shit thinks he can just fuck with me and get exactly what he wants…_

“How’d you crack my firewall?” He spits quietly, venomously. His dangerous tone doesn’t seem to faze the man even vaguely.

“Ah, I was hoping you’d ask about that,” The man runs a hand through his short-cropped hair, chuckling fondly, “We ended up hiring a bloke who specializes in finding people and getting into their systems. Useless otherwise. Bit of a knob who lives in his grandma’s basement in Manchester and collects tiny unicorn figurines... Anyway, we traced you to Rome and he did the rest. I don’t know the science behind it but it took him nearly twenty solid hours to get in. That’s _twenty_ hours I spent staring at unicorn figurines for you, love. You should be flattered. Besides, a messenger app is hardly a breach. More like a nudge.”

 _Nudge, my ass,_ Arthur wants to snarl, but instead he keeps his lips pressed into a hard line.

“Anyway, here you are. You wouldn’t have come if something hadn’t nipped at your interest. And I’m going to be upfront with you: I can’t tell you everything now… there are a lot of nuances to what we do…”

“Get to the point,” Arthur says each word in staccato through his teeth.

“The point is… the shit you’ve been doing since you’ve defected is a toddler’s first day at Sunday school compared to what we do. And I’ve done enough background on you to _know_ that you’re going to recoil from that statement but I can _guarantee_ you it isn’t meant to offend. It’s like I said in my message to you last night… you’re wasted on these family feud missions. Jacked up corporate shareholders trying to get a leg up on one another… it’s like herding a bunch of feral cats. And you’re above that.”

Arthur stares at him with a blank expression.

“So you _are_ thieves. You’re criminals.”

“So are you, love,” The sentence is accented with a sly wink, “We just have higher prices on our heads. Scarier skeletons in our closets. Worse monsters under our beds. But it’s more complex like that, and I really think you’ll have to get into our groove to be able to see it. We roll in dirtier shit but we come out on top. Always. Higher than you’ll ever get to if you stay where you are. So a lot of this decision is based on blind trust, and I know that. But Arthur… _Arthur_ …” He says Arthur’s name like he’s whispering a holy secret, “You’re one of a kind. So give me an answer.”

The man’s eyes are expectant as he stares Arthur down. Arthur feels the fog begin to descend again over the piazza, turning his sweat to ice and making his fingertips sting. For once, his mind is surprisingly quiet. He can smell the man’s aftershave from this distance: oaky with accents of orange and spice. He can feel his answer already in the pit of his stomach. After a moment of tense silence, he finally speaks.

“Tell me who you are.”

The man’s expression changes ever so slightly; his eyes turning intense as if he’s trying to flip Arthur open to find his index and figure out exactly what page to start reading him from. Finally, _finally_ …

“You can call me Eames.”

“Eames.” The name feels foreign and slippery on his tongue. It crashes through his mind like it’s on a collision course.

“Eames,” He says again, leaning forward, “when do I start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks ONCE AGAIN to [Stellar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem) for editing and saying nice things and letting me complain to her at ungodly hours. 
> 
> And thanks to YOU for actually reading this thing and commenting and being super duper nice to me. I love you. I hope you stick around.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a while, folks. And by a while, I mean _years_. I've been with the Inception fandom since the beginning, but I haven't touched A/E in a long time. This is partially because I shared my love for them with not one, but _two_ toxic, abusive friends, both of whom are now completely blocked from my life. So, writing this fic is actually super cathartic because it's kind of like I'm reclaiming and re-inventing these two idiots for myself, on my own terms. 
> 
> HUGE thank you to StellarReqiuem, without whom this fic would not be here. Thanks for the encouragement and the edits and for forcing me to realize that it isn't complete shit. 
> 
> Title credit: Paul Simon


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